Democrats Should End Quest for Kennedy's Camelot
Author: Virginia Postrel
Source: Bloomburg View
Date Published: Nov. 19th 2013
Grades: 9th-12 (Mixed abilities)
Subject: Civics, Current Events, AP Government
URL: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-11-19/democrats-should-end-quest-for-kennedy-scamelot
Purpose: This CISM will work on critical thinking and analysis, while understanding the literary
and historical significance of the term Camelot.
Enduring Question: Is the quest for a political utopia futile?
Essential Question: Should democrats end the quest for “Kennedy’s Camelot?”
CCGPS:
ELACC11-12RI1: Cite strong and thorough textual evidence to support analysis of what the
text says explicitly as well as inferences drawn from the text, including determining where
the text leaves matters uncertain.
SSUSH23 The student will describe and assess the impact of political developments
between 1945 and 1970.
SSUSH22 The student will identify dimensions of the Civil Rights Movement, 1945-1970.
Vocabulary: persuasion, evocative, anthropologist, empirical, utopia, unsubstantiated,
improbable, validated, messianic, compulsive, conjured.
Suggested Coding for: Democrats Should End Quest for Kennedy’s Camelot.
*T- Threat
*H-Hopeful
*M=Much Impact
*-Neutral
*L= Little Impact
(OR)
*C=Cause *E=Effect
Materials:


The Article: Democrats Should End Quest for Kennedy’s Camelot
Graphic Organizers: directed note taking guide, and writing assignment sheet.
Democrats Should End Quest for Kennedy's Camelot
Author: Virginia Postrel
Source: Bloomburg View
Date Published: Nov. 19th 2013
Grades: 9th-12 (Mixed abilities)
Subject: Civics, Current Events, AP Government
URL: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-11-19/democrats-should-end-quest-for-kennedy-scamelot
Procedure
Suggested Time
0-10 minutes
Teacher Will
Facilitate discussion on
the enduring question.
Student will
Breakup into small groups to discuss
the question then come together for
group discussion.
10-20
Teacher will front load
the article’s vocabulary
20-40
Students will define the vocabulary
terms either through context clues or
searching for the words definition. This
may be done via internet search, smartphone, or dictionary.
Students will take notes and mark
coding. Stopping for group discussion
on why they choose any given code.
Teacher will read the text
and model the text coding
through paragraph 6.
After paragraph 6, teacher
will read orally stopping
(students may practice fluency)
at the bold subtitles to
discuss coding.
(Optional popcorn read
with students)
Students will fill out their DirectedNote-Taking graphic organizer.
40-50
Students will create “I wonder
questions” from the text.
50-55
60-75
Teacher will facilitate
answering and discussion
activities.
*Deposit/Withdrawal
*The Lottery
*Stand and Whip
*Popcorn
80
Closing activity teacher
will post a multiple
choice question for the
final group discussion
Teacher will assign final
responses
85
Students will choose the BEST possible
answer and discuss.
Take home for homework, or do as a
warm-up next class. `
Democrats Should End Quest for Kennedy's Camelot
Author: Virginia Postrel
Source: Bloomburg View
Date Published: Nov. 19th 2013
Grades: 9th-12 (Mixed abilities)
Subject: Civics, Current Events, AP Government
URL: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-11-19/democrats-should-end-quest-for-kennedy-scamelot
Using the information from the text to support your answer, which of the following
best describes the author’s purpose?
A. Camelot isn’t something to aspire to have.
B. Camelot wasn’t about politics, it was about imagination.
C. Camelot only occurs after death.
Extended Writing:
RAFT Writing assignment:
Role: Political analyst
Audience: Liberal Media
Format: Speech
Topic: Camelot is found by comprise,
and caring for fellow man
2. Political Analyst
Audience: Conservative Media
Format: Speech
Topic: The search for Camelot is the search
for moral, and political decline.
Democrats Should End Quest for Kennedy's Camelot
Author: Virginia Postrel
Source: Bloomburg View
Date Published: Nov. 19th 2013
Grades: 9th-12 (Mixed abilities)
Subject: Civics, Current Events, AP Government
URL: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-11-19/democrats-should-end-quest-for-kennedy-scamelot
MAIN IDEAS
Main idea
Details
Democrats Should End Quest for Kennedy's Camelot
Author: Virginia Postrel
Source: Bloomburg View
Date Published: Nov. 19th 2013
Grades: 9th-12 (Mixed abilities)
Subject: Civics, Current Events, AP Government
URL: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-11-19/democrats-should-end-quest-for-kennedy-scamelot
When she was 22, the future Jacqueline Kennedy won a
Vogue contest with an essay in which she dreamed of
being “a sort of Overall Art Director of the Twentieth
Century.” As first lady, she proved herself a genius at
visual persuasion. She crafted her own image, refined
her husband’s, re-created the White House’s, and even
shaped America’s abroad.
1
Her most evocative and enduring image-making came when John F. Kennedy was assassinated,
50 years ago this week. She art-directed the funeral’s pageantry and then, in an interview with
T.H. White for Life magazine, memorably linked her husband to one of the most powerful
legends in the English-speaking world. Jackie created the myth of the Kennedy administration as
Camelot: the lost golden age that proved ideals could become real.
2
3
The Arthurian legends traditionally operate as what the cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken
calls “displaced meaning.” Every culture, he observes, maintains ideals that can never be fully
realized in everyday life, from Christian charity to economic equality. Yet for all their empirical
failings, such cultural ideals supply essential purpose and meaning, offering identity and hope.
To preserve and transmit them, cultures develop images and stories that portray a distant world
in which their ideals are realized -- a paradise, a utopia, a golden age, a promised land, a world to
come. Camelot is such a setting.
4
“When they are transported to a distant cultural domain,” McCracken writes, “ideals are made to
seem practicable realities. What is otherwise unsubstantiated and potentially improbable in the
present world is now validated, somehow ‘proven,’ by its existence in another, distant one.”
5
The Arthurian legends, especially when taken as history, demonstrate the validity of ideals
including Christian virtue, power in the service of justice, and unity rather than civil war.
6
Camelot isn’t a true utopia, however. It destroys itself from within, through adultery, betrayal
and dissension, suggesting that such ideals can exist only for “one brief shining moment.” That
King Arthur may someday return from his mysterious refuge in Avalon gives the tales a
messianic element, preserving their displaced meaning. But the Arthurian legends are a tragic
romance -- a narrative full of struggle as well as glory.
Democrats Should End Quest for Kennedy's Camelot
Author: Virginia Postrel
Source: Bloomburg View
Date Published: Nov. 19th 2013
Grades: 9th-12 (Mixed abilities)
Subject: Civics, Current Events, AP Government
URL: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-11-19/democrats-should-end-quest-for-kennedy-scamelot
7
8
Not so the Kennedy Camelot. The Kennedy administration ended with sudden violence from
without, making Jackie’s analogy doubly potent. It suggested a parallel with a legendary Golden
Age while simultaneously implying that, left to itself, this new Golden Age might have
continued indefinitely. This Camelot was pure glamour: a frozen moment, its flaws and conflicts
obscured.
Glamour invites projection. For 50 years, Americans of various persuasions have imagined their
ideals embodied in a Camelot that might have been. Advocates of a vigorous Cold War foreign
policy claim John Kennedy. So do their opposites. He did less for the civil-rights movement than
his unglamorous successor, Lyndon Johnson, yet in imagination he would have done more.
Above all, people imagine that somehow a living Kennedy would have prevented the tumult of
the 1960s.
9
What they don’t imagine is what happens to real presidents who live to be re-elected. The
downsides of their policies become apparent. Their dirty secrets come out. The public tires of
them.
10
Thanks to his sudden, violent death, JFK is forever young and forever whatever his adoring fans
imagine him to be. The scandals that would have come -- the dangerously compulsive
womanizing, the secret injections and medical coverups, the dirty tricks -- are historic footnotes.
The foreign-policy missteps and domestic political fights of a second term never happened.
11
12
13
For a half-century, Democrats have tried to recapture the magic of Camelot, and for a halfcentury, they have failed. They’ve mistakenly imagined that Camelot was about politics, culture
or style. But, like all forms of glamour, Camelot was about imagination and desire. Glamour is a
fragile illusion that, like humor, shatters with too much scrutiny.
The current president was, as a candidate, the most glamorous American politician since JFK. In
2008, Barack Obama was not just a young, handsome, slightly exotic figure with a beautiful
family and a vision of change. He was the embodiment of his supporters’ deepest longings for
their country and their president. He was, as a friend said during the campaign, “a kind of human
Rorschach test.” Different people projected different, often contradictory ideals onto him, just as
they did -- and still do -- onto Kennedy.
The realities of politics and policy have punctured Obama’s glamour. He has become yet another
embattled second-term president. He hasn’t recaptured Camelot. And for that, all Americans,
supporters and opponents alike, should be grateful. Camelot is a myth born from an assassin’s
bullet and a widow’s image-making gifts. It never existed in real life. It was conjured only in
death.
Democrats Should End Quest for Kennedy's Camelot
Author: Virginia Postrel
Source: Bloomburg View
Date Published: Nov. 19th 2013
Grades: 9th-12 (Mixed abilities)
Subject: Civics, Current Events, AP Government
URL: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2013-11-19/democrats-should-end-quest-for-kennedy-scamelot
(Virginia Postrel is a Bloomberg View columnist. Her book, “The Power of Glamour,” was
recently published by Simon & Schuster. Her website is at vpostrel.com. Follow her on Twitter
at @vpostrel.)
To contact the writer of this article: Virginia Postrel at vp@dynamist.com.
To contact the editor responsible for this article: Tobin Harshaw at tharshaw@bloomberg.net